Bruce’s Price Is Right
In 1995, physiotherapist Brian Gilmore won once-in-a‑lifetime prizes on Bruce’s Price Is Right, including a conservatory, an antique egg-holder and a fridge-freezer. But his winnings became a bit of a nightmare. The gameshow hosted by Bruce Forsyth entailed contestants being selected from the audience and running down the stairs as the announcer yells “Come on down!”, before competing to win prizes by estimating their RRP.
A gang of people at work said, “We’re going to go and watch this new TV show being recorded: Bruce’s Price Is Right.” It was the very first series. I wanted to make sure that if I was selected I wouldn’t make stupid guesses, so I had a strategy. I had borrowed the Argos catalogue had been swotting up on the prices for two weeks.
There were two shows filmed that day. Brucie came out and did his own warm-up – that was a good craic. Then he filmed the first show. We got a flavour of what was happening with the cameras and the lighting. And seeing people going down the steps hoping they didn’t fall on their butt was quite good fun.
There was an American who had no idea what pounds sterling were! He didn’t win the jetski or the car. So when the first show ended as a bit of a damp squib, I thought: “Bloody hell, this is great! We all know what’s behind the curtain. And if any of us get called down, we know what the price is going to be.” Brucie then came out and started to film the second episode. And I got called down! I thought: “We’re in! I know what the car is!”
Neither the jetski nor the car were prizes on Gilmore’s turn. Instead, he won an “antique, silver-plated egg cruet set”.
I had no idea that the show wouldn’t have rollover prizes, so to see something as interesting as six antique egg cups was not a particular high point.
I then played another game, and with that came bigger prizes. There were four items and four prizes. I had to choose which was the cheapest and which was the most expensive.
Gilmore chose correctly and won a lamp table, a writing bureau, a microwave grill (for “perfect crisping and baking”) and a fridge-freezer.
I won an old-fashioned type of writing bureau. I thought: “Nice piece of kit. But do I really want one? Where’s my car? I want the jetski! I don’t want a feckin’ egg cup, never mind six of them!”
I didn’t have a lake, but there was a chance I could have used the bloody jetski. Why did you give me a microwave? I’m in a shared house. I haven’t got a kitchen. I don’t know what I’m going to do with a fridge-freezer. And now I’m panicking, because I need a living room as well, and probably an office for that bureau.
Gilmore then played a game called Spin to Win, won £1,000 in cash and made it through to the final round, the Showcase Showdown, where he could bid for the top tier of prizes. In that game, he won a gazebo, a hot tub and the biggest prize of the night … a “Victorian-style conservatory”. The total value was £16,500.
Winning the cash was the best moment. It was a significant amount of money. I was able to buy holidays for my family. That was cash, something I could hold. It wasn’t like the bloody egg cups.
And the other prizes? I don’t have a garden for a gazebo. I’m standing there with a hot tub. I’ve got nowhere to put it. And the biggest prize? A conservatory? I’ve never had a house!
After the show, the production team said, “Right, where do you want us to deliver these?” And I was like, “Woah! Woah! You can’t deliver a gazebo. I’m in a shared house!” So I spoke to them during lunch breaks for quite a few weeks, saying, “I know you’ve got to get rid of the stuff, but I genuinely have nowhere to put it.”
I had to ring around – this is before the internet – and find a storage facility. It cost me £100, plus £10 per item per week. Absolute nightmare.
So my money’s going down, I’m paying to store some tat. And every day when I walked through the fracture clinic at the hospital, a nurse would say on the microphone, “Brian Gilmore! Come on down!”
I used free ads to try to sell the hot tub and the conservatory, and they generated no interest. That was depressing. I found someone to buy the big freezer and the microwave, but had to pay to get them delivered. And I wasn’t able to sell the fridge-freezer for its RRP of £350. I had to sell it secondhand as, legally, I had already owned it.
I kept the table and the bureau until around 2014. I managed to flog the garden furniture. For the conservatory, I got a credit note, but I needed someone who would buy it off me. It was like winning a scratchcard but finding you can’t cash it in. By some miracle, one of the sisters in the hospital had a father who was going to buy a conservatory. She put us together and we agreed a fair offer.
I sold the hot tub just before my wedding, so I was able to buy a big round of drinks at the hotel for the 200 people who came – Brucie’s round! That was good craic.
And the antique egg cups? They are in an old Sports Direct bag in my garage.
The Hit List
NHS manager George and his daughter Hannah, are from West Yorkshire. This summer, they won £3,668 on The Hit List, a BBC show in which contestants have to guess a song from an excerpt.
George I’ve watched The Hit List from the beginning. We obviously played along at home.
Hannah No, no! Tell the truth.
George What?
Hannah You don’t like it when other people watch it with you. When they start talking, he’ll pause the TV, so he can hear it. It’s so annoying.
George I’m a very serious individual when it comes to music quizzes.
Hannah You got the phone call from one of the producers and thought she was taking the piss.
George Luckily, she had some patience, because I was like, “Yeah whatever, whoever this is, when I find out I’m properly going to roast you up,” and she was like, “No, I really am calling you from The Hit List.” And then my wife was like, “Yeah, I actually did apply for you.”
George and Hannah made it through to the final round, in which they had to correctly guess 10 songs to win £10,000. They could skip any song, but if they did, the total would go down. They won £3,668, but could have won £8,346 if they had recognised a couple of records, including an Arctic Monkeys song.
George Let’s just say Arctic Monkeys’ 505 has never been played in this home since that day.
Hannah I think we got lucky because the other contestants, a couple and two girls, were quite close in age, whereas we covered two different generations.
George and Hannah split their winnings, with George putting his money towards his 25th wedding anniversary celebrations, and Hannah using hers to go to Australia.
Hannah It paid for the flights, yours to Antigua, mine to Australia.
George It saved me a couple of grand, so I’m happy. But the show is just so nice – the whole experience. They really look out for you. They genuinely encourage you, cheering you on when you get it right.
Hannah We also got a day trip to Scotland where The Hit List is made.
Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel
The Wheel features a contestant choosing a subject, before a wheel with celebrities sitting on it is spun to see which of them will help answer the question. If they get the answer wrong, a new contestant is picked at random to have a chance to “complete the wheel”. Colin Brown, from Fife , got his first question wrong when he appeared in September this year, but returned to play again later in the show.
I just had a moment where I thought: “I’m going to see what’s out there.” So I went on the BBC Take Part website, saw The Wheel and thought: “I’m going to throw my hat into the ring for that.” When I got invited to be on the show, it was pretty surreal. I didn’t let myself build up too many expectations, because that would have added pressure. So it was more or less, “Go on, if you come away with a few grand, absolutely fantastic.”
Question one wasn’t my finest moment. I’m putting that down to the nerves and the adrenaline. But after that it was almost like the stars aligned.
The final question, with Richard Madeley as Brown’s helper, was: “According to the Natural History Museum, which of these dinosaurs would have been the heaviest? A. Triceratops. B. Diplodocus. C. Iguanodon. D. Tyrannosaurus.” Brown chose B. Diplodocus, the correct answer. In celebration, he did a lap of the studio, high-fiving every celebrity helper. He walked away with £92,000, and is donating a proportion of it to the Dwarf Sports Association, a charity that helps people affected by dwarfism, like himself and his son.
When I got the money, I went to the bank and said, “I’ve never had this amount of money before, where do I put it?” I opened an Isa, and put a large amount in there, and then I paid off a few bills. We’re in the process of home improvements, so we can do that a little bit quicker. I’ve not really gone wild yet – I’m not sure my wife will let me go wild, but I bought a new family car. I’m going to pay a chunk of the mortgage off. You just never know what is around the corner.
We’re part of the Dwarf Sports Association, DSAuk. There’s a world games coming up in Australia, so that’s going to be a holiday for us. But we’re also looking at how we can help others.
Being a person with dwarfism is difficult. When I grew up, that organisation wasn’t around. So to see my son taking part in athletics and sports on that level playing field and thriving – he’s never lacked confidence, but just seeing him buzzing … It is really close to our hearts.
The Chase
In 2021, Eden Nash, from Bishop’s Stortford, won £75,000 as the sole remaining contestant in a nail-biting Chase final, the highest ever solo win. He was 20 when the show was filmed.
My nan and grandad used to come round once a week, and they watched The Chase religiously. And when I was about 13 or 14, I used to get quite a few right for someone my age. Also, watching it quite a bit, I realised that if there’s something out of my wheelhouse, there’ll be an obvious answer. There always is.
On my 18th birthday, I applied for The Chase, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the London Marathon. Six months later, I got a phone call from The Chase’s production team, and they gave me a 10-question quiz, like Mastermind. They don’t tell you how you got on, but I was invited to another audition in Cambridge, where there were a lot more questions. After that, you get put on a database, with thousands of people on it.
Luckily, I got chosen. During my game, I thought that if I could get seven or eight grand shared among the team, I might be able to get a secondhand car like an Alfa Romeo, because my cousin’s got one and it looks pretty cool. But then my teammates all got eliminated.
When it went to the final Chase, it was all in my favour. When you have two or three teammates, you have to wait to buzz in as you’re unsure whether this question might be in someone else’s domain, whereas when you’re alone you can guess or pass quite quickly.
Nash got 18 answers correct in the final Chase, on subjects including the 1976 US presidential election, Morrissey and Cheers. “That is brilliant for a 20-year‑old, that is amazing,” said the host, Bradley Walsh, after a chance to win £75,000 came up. Darragh Ennis, the chaser, couldn’t correctly answer the same number of questions, resulting in Nash winning the money and Ennis’s first ever loss. You can watch his win here.
Weeks later, I went on to my online banking, and that’s when I saw the balance of 75 grand and 20p, or whatever. And it was like: “Well, this is the most money I’m ever gonna see in my life.” It was a bit overwhelming.
The money came through a couple of days before my 21st, during the pandemic. Had the world been as normal, I might have splurged it all on a night out. But I ended up making some right decisions in the end. A trip to Magaluf was planned, but that kept getting kicked down the road year after year, and I don’t think that’s happening now.
Around the same time, my parents inherited some money. I gave some of my winnings to my sister, some to my cousin, and some to the animal rescue charity we got our dog from. I used half of what was left, and some inheritance, for a deposit on a flat with my sister. I put the other half in some investments. Because it was in lockdown, I could see there wasn’t anything I was going to be spending it on.
The first thing we ended up using it for was a dog operation, because dogs are the best thing ever. I was thinking: “What would a dog do with £75,000?” They’d look after people, wouldn’t they? Quid pro quo, and all that.
I had just dropped out of university a couple of months before The Chase. And I was on work experience when I got a call from a producer, asking whether I would want to be on the show. I was put in touch with job recruiters in December 2019, knowing that I had The Chase in my back pocket in February. I went for a few interviews at different companies, and I was quite relaxed because I knew I had the show to look forward to if other things didn’t go to plan. Luckily, they coincided. I went on The Chase on a Thursday; four days later I had my first day at work for an insurance company, and I’ve been here ever since.
Deal Or No Deal
Ruby Jamal, a single mum of three, has worked as a railway guard for 20 years. She applied for Deal Or No Deal after stumbling across an advert on her phone in the early hours of the morning. She went on to take part recently, and won £24,700.
I’ve always been a massive fan of the show, and I’m a very lucky person. I always say, “Little and often is better.” If I buy a lottery ticket, I know I’m gonna win something, even if it’s a small amount. If I buy a raffle ticket, I buy the ticket because I know I’m going to win. If I take the kids away, we go to the seaside and they want this and that. I’ll go to the claw machine and end up picking two or three toys out in one go.
For the last 11 years, I’ve been raising my three children, and I’ve not had any time to do anything for myself. I was really shocked that I got on to the show, but they keep telling you that you’re not guaranteed to play: there are only 20 episodes, but there are 42 contestants. The week before, we were sent an email to say our filming had been extended for another day, and I was like: “Well, I can’t do it, because I’m actually flying out on holiday that night.” And lo and behold, I got to play on the 19th show, which was the day before.
The game sees the chosen contestant gradually opening sealed boxes that each contain a different amount of cash from 1p to £100,000. The contestant can either stick with their own unopened box and win whatever amount it contains, or accept an offer from the banker (the value of which depends on the sums still available in the remaining unopened boxes) to give it up.
I started my game and I had box number eight. I don’t have any special numbers, but I was going to keep box number 22 in the game because there’s just something about that box that I liked. I knocked out a lot of the reds [the higher value boxes]. I actually broke a record with seven consecutive reds. But then I started getting rid of all the blues [worth from 1p to £750]. Towards the end, there were two blues [worth £50 and £500] and three reds [worth £10,000, £75,000 and £100,000] left. I was then offered £24,700.
I was not going to deal, but another contestant said, “You’ve been here from day one. People have got to this stage and then it has gone downhill.” So I took the £24,700. And lo and behold, the £100,000 was actually in box 22. I was like, “Oh my God!” I had the 10 grand in my box, which I would have been guaranteed to have taken away, so £24,700 was a hell of a lot more money.
The whole experience … I can’t even express how amazing it was. I work on the railway and I am a guard, so I experience lots of things. On a Friday or Saturday night, I get my uniform on, go to work, and I walk down that train and people are scared of me. I’ll be like, “You ain’t got a ticket, you’re getting off!” It doesn’t frighten me, the confrontation and stuff. But I’m crying in most of these episodes, because it was really emotional. It was really personal.
I need to get my kitchen done, and I’ve had the plans done now. I’m also a massive K-pop and K-drama fan, and so is my mum, so we’re going to go to South Korea next year. And Mum has got a sister in India, but she hasn’t seen her for 17 years, so ideally I’d like to see her go, because tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
